Microsoft files 'final' documents with EU

Microsoft had submitted another batch of technical information about Windows to the European Commission's anti-trust department, hitting the last deadline imposed on the software giant.

By
Paul Meller, IDG News Service
| Nov 23, 2006

| IDG News Service

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Microsoft had submitted another batch of technical information about Windows to the European Commission's anti-trust department, hitting the last deadline imposed on the software giant.

Microsoft called the submission "an important milestone". Final edits and technical review of information that the company submitted previously to the regulator, in July, have now also been completed, it added.

"Now the submission from Microsoft is worth testing," said Jonathan Todd, the Commission's spokesman. "Licensees will be invited to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond to look at it."

Last week, the Commission's anti-trust chief, Neelie Kroes, expressed growing impatience with Microsoft when she imposed Thursday's Thanksgiving deadline. She described the dossier submitted in July as incomplete and warned Microsoft that it faced daily fines of €3 million, back-dated to the end of July, if it didn't hand over all the technical information about Windows that it was ordered to reveal in a March 2004 anti-trust ruling against it.

Microsoft claimed today it had met that deadline. "The Trustee and Microsoft have now completed the technical review and edits to the more than 100 documents, totalling 8,500 pages, that we submitted in July of this year, in accordance with the deadline established by the Commission," the company said in a statement.

In 2004, Microsoft was found guilty of abusing the dominant strength of Windows in order to muscle in on other software markets, including that of server operating systems. The ruling ordered Microsoft to reveal enough information about Windows to allow rival server software vendors, including Sun and Red Hat, to design server products that inter-operated as well with Windows PCs as Microsoft's own Windows Server OS.

If the review of the information by licensees does not determine that it will allow rival server products to work seamlessly, Microsoft will face the €3 million daily fine, Todd said. Microsoft may get fined in any case for the period between the July deadline and Thursday's final submission of information. "We'll take a decision about this period of time in due course," Todd said.